Datasheet

CG productions of even the simplest topics can follow this simple organization. By fol-
lowing a similar layout in the scripting and storyboarding of your own short, you will find
the entire production process will become easier and the effect of your film stronger.
Lighting
Without lights, you can’t capture anything on film. How you light your scene affects the
contrast of the frame as well as the color balance and your overall design impact. For the
most part, a typical lighting solution called the three-point system is the basis from which
to at least begin when lighting a scene. This method places a key light in front of the scene
as the primary illumination and to cast the shadows in the scene. The key light is typically
placed behind the camera and off to one side to create a highlight on one side of the object
for contrast’s sake. The rest of the scene is given a fill light. The fill acts to illuminate the
rest of the scene but is typically not as bright as the key light. The fill also helps soften
harsh shadows from the key light. To pop the subject out from the background, a back
light is used to illuminate the silhouette of the subject. This is also known as a rim light
because it creates a slight halo or rim around the subject in the scene. It’s a faint light
compared with the key or fill lights.
Create lights in your scene that are too flat or even and you can greatly weaken your
composition and abate your scene’s impact. The more you understand how real lights
affect your subjects in photography, the better equipped you will be in CG lighting.
Although CG lighting techniques can vary wildly from real life, the desired results are
often the same. You’ll learn more about Maya lighting techniques in Chapter 10.
Basic Animation Concepts
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, animation is the representation of change
over time. That’s a simple view of an amazing art that has been practiced in one way or
another for some time. Although this section cannot cover all of them, here are a few key
terms you will come across numerous times on your journey into CG animation.
Frames, Keyframes, In-Betweens
Each drawing of an animation, or in the case of CG, a single rendered image, is called a
frame. A frame also refers to a unit of time in animation whose exact chronological length
depends on how fast the animation will eventually play back (frame rate). For example, at
film rate (24fps), a single frame will last 1⁄24 of a second. At NTSC video rate (30fps), that
same frame will last 1⁄30 of a second.
Keyframes are key frames at which the animator creates a pose for a character (or what-
ever is being animated). In CG terms, a keyframe is a frame in which a pose, a position, or
some other such value has been saved in time. Animation is created when an object travels
or changes from one keyframe to another. You will see how creating poses for animation
works firsthand in Chapter 9, when you create the poses for a simple walking human figure.
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